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The Supreme Court on Wednesday directed the revision of E-KYC norms to enable people with visual impairment or facial disfigurement to access banking and other services. E-KYC is the electronic or digital version of Know Your Customer, a process mandated by the Reserve Bank of India that institutions use to verify the identities of their customers.

The judgement comes as a response to two writ petitions filed before the Supreme Court which highlighted the exclusionary nature of the current digital KYC norms.

“You need to blink an eye when you do your E-KYC,” said Amar Jain, a visually-impaired corporate lawyer who is one of the petitioners in the case. “This is a real problem for persons with blindness and persons who have faced acid attack.”

Pragya Prasun, the second petitioner in the case, had faced trouble with buying a mobile SIM card as well as opening a bank account. “My concern was that slowly, it should not spread everywhere where if I have to get a ticket, boarding pass, or cash from an ATM, I’ll have to blink an eye to use that facility,” she said.

Ruling that the right to digital access is an intrinsic part of the right to life and personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution, the Supreme Court issued twenty directions to make the E-KYC process accessible, holding that acid attack survivors and person with visual impairment are entitled to the protection under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016.

“The fundamental problem with anything that we do in our system is that unless you start involving people with disabilities, as co-creators of the processes, you are going to exclude them forever,” said Amar Jain. “When we created physical infrastructure, we did not consider the needs of people with disability. Now they are doing this with digital infrastructures as well,” he added.